Iran airs spy footage it (allegedly) took from a captured U.S. drone

By Dashiell Bennett

February 7, 2013

Iran is jumping on the drone news bandwagon today, with an expertly timed release that it claims is decrypted surveillance footage taken from a downed American drone. You may recall that in December 2011, the United States lost a unmanned, unarmed drone somewhere near the border between Iran and Afghanistan, and that the Iranian military said they found the plane and put it on display. (Iran claimed they shot it down, the Pentagon said it was simply lost.) For the last year or so, they've made claims about trying to reverse engineer it, or hack its computer systems, or possibly even sell it to China for spare parts (and intelligence.) Now, the Iranians says that they did crack the American system, and decrypted the camera footage it had shot before it went down.